Last week, when Encyclopaedia Britannica went out of print, 41-year-old entrepreneur Sameer Shariff was smiling with satisfaction at his Bangalore office at having bagged the 244-year-old Chicago-based publisher as a client.

It took Shariff over a year to finally get Britannica on board, but for the avid runner who wants to run a marathon in every continent, that's all in a day's work.

Digital Future

Shariff's company Impelsys, little known outside the publishing world, is working Britannica to push the digital versions of the encyclopaedia through different mobile platforms such as iPad and Kindle, for individual users as well as institutions.

With the print edition out of the picture due to competition from digital variants, Britannica is looking for a stronger foothold in the digital publishing space and Bangalore-based Impelsys is helping them in its new journey.

"We believe books are going to be digital in the future," said Shariff whose firm lets publishers like Britannica use its platform to manage and monetise their traditional media assets without making upfront investments of their own.

About two years ago when Britannica's digital learning division was looking for a technology partner, Impelsys got noticed because Shariff had been frequenting book fairs globally with his firm's publishing platform. In about six months, Impelsys had signed up Britannica.

Originally published from Scotland in 1768, the encyclopaedia has been in print every since, but the sales of print editions were getting impacted by free online encyclopaedia such as Wikipedia.

New Channel of Sales

The Bangalore-based firm has already set up an e-book portal - www.ebooks.eb.com - for Britannica. Users will also be able to purchase specific chapters or articles through mobile apps - iPad users from Apple Store, Kindle users from Amazon or Android-based phone and tablet users from Android Market.

Every time a product is purchased, Impelsys earns a percentage of the transaction.

A few months ago, Impelsys published hundreds of non fiction e-book titles for schools, universities and libraries on behalf of Britannica Digital Learning, a division of Encyclopaedia Britannica that provides classroom products and solutions for educators.

Greg Healy, chief product officer at Encyclopaedia Britannica, said that partnering with technology service firms like Impelsys is part of the firm's strategy to create compelling web-based products for consumers, and developing relevant and reliable mobile products. Such strategic partnerships will help Britannica develop new channels of sales through innovative technologies, Healy added.

Revenue streams are still volatile for Impelsys as it depends on transaction-based revenues, but Shariff thinks building a business is much like running a marathon, with its ups and downs. "I'm in it for the long haul. It's like running a marathon," said Shariff who is looking to run a marathon in Africa next year. Building a business is like "in some parts of the marathon; it stretches, but you have to get to the finish line. I believe you have to build a business like that; you can't give up."

Serial Entrepreneur

Shariff, a serial entrepreneur who founded his first company while at Wharton School of Business in the late nineties, is expecting the revenue growth to gather momentum as the digital medium gains prominence, especially for large legacy publishers. Medsite, his first venture which was an internet pharmaceutical marketer, was sold in 2006 for more than $40 million.

"When iPad was launched, we knew that books will never be the same again," said Shariff who decided to invest nearly $ 2 million into creating a digital publishing platform aimed at benefiting from that future.

Impelsys gave the platform to a few publishers including the MIT Press to test and recognition came soon after with clients such as Elsevier, McGraw Hill and Sesame Street signing up. In 2009, Shariff clinched a major deal and visibility when it signed up Sesame Workshop to convert nearly 900 of their over 5,000 published books into e-books.

Shariff, who declined to share details about his firm's revenues, said that Impelsys now has about 400 publishers as clients. For Shariff the runner, long-winding chases are never a turn off. "In Paris (marathon), my legs practically gave away. But I got to the finish."